A new experimental electronic music and digital arts festival dedicated to advanced sonic practices in experimental, electronic music and expanded sensations is launching in Europe. UnScene's inaugural theme is Sinister Emissions and it will take place in the city of Niedzdrow in Autumn this year.

Peter Brötzmann will be playing with his newly formed improvising group Horn 'O' Plenty, created after he disbanded the Chicago Tentet earlier this year. The new group includes Joe McPhee, Mats Gustafsson, Ken Vandermark, Michael Zerang, Fredrick Lonberg-Holm, Hamid Drake, Jeb Bishop, Johannes Bauer, Kent Kessler and Mars Williams.

Also confirmed is a collaboration between national treasure Chris Watson and Icelander Ben Frost, who will present a cinematic sonification of the lifecycle of a psychedelic lichen unique to Iceland. Tim Hecker will be playing a version of Athanasius Kircher's Katzenklavier instrument, generated via custom Max For Live patches. Thurston Moore will be playing in a series of improvised sets where he will collaborate with every artist on the bill separately.

Demdike Stare and every member of the Modern Love roster will be collaborating on a live rework of the entire Radiophonic Workshop output, utilising an early answerphone voice synthesiser developed by Bell Labs. A recording of the set will be released immediately after the show on a limited run of hand-dubbed Betamax tapes with screenprinted artwork.

Matthew Herbert has been specially commissioned by the festival to develop a site specific performance investigating George Formby's forgotten years, where Herbert will be working with Rhys Chatham conducting an orchestra of 100 volunteer banjo players sourced from the local area, exploring the legacy of Formby's work via the discrete tonal differences in each of his instruments. Herbert has been granted special access to the Formby archive and will start work on the project next month.

The world premiere of James Ferraro's new crowdsourced durational opera will be performed, Snake, a tribute to the Nokia 3310, with a contemporary NY dance troupe playing the parts of the snake. The piece will be simulcast online using NetScape Navigator.

Occultic dark ambient electronic music producers who nobody has quite been able to tag, and whose names are largely interchangeable, will be soundtracking rediscovered classics of the oft-forgotten Czech Gothic-nasty genre.

Also on the schedule is a PAN label showcase.

Some of Alice Coltrane's devotional music, recorded after she changed her name to Turiyasangitananda and established her own Ashram, is available again on CD.

The music was originally released on CD and cassette in the 1980s and 1990s, on her own private press imprint the Avatar Book Institute. Available again are: Infinite Chants, Divine Songs, and Radha Botofasina's Songs Of The Eternal Soul, which includes Coltrane on organ. Missing from this batch is Turiya Sings and Glorious Chants, but also available is Coltrane's spiritual memoir Monument Eternal (which has a wonderful font on the cover).

More details on Sounds Of The Universe.

Taktlos Festival in Zurich celebrates its 30th birthday in May with a line up that includes the Sun Ra Arkestra directed by Marshall Allen, performing on what would have been the 100th birthday of Sun Ra. Also set to perform is Barry Guy's New Orchestra, its ranks including Evan Parker, Mats Gustafsson, Trevor Watts, Paul Lytton and others.

Full line up and more info here.

Laraaji's next set of shows promise to be a laugh a minute (literally), as he's holding a series of laughter meditation workshops – part of his tour with Sun Araw, where attendees will learn how even forced laughter can be a path to physical, mental and spiritual health.

Stallones and the zither master set off on a European tour this month, and Laraaji hosts three laugh with Laraaji meditation workshops in London (Cafe Oto, 4 June), Liverpool (Kazimier, 7 June) and Bristol (8 June). More details here, and a full tour listing in our listing section.

Swans hit the road in May, to mark the release of their next album To Be Kind, which includes Little Annie, St Vincent's Annie Clark and others. A string of US shows will be followed by ten dates in the UK, starting in Manchester on 22 May, before they head across the pond to Canada.

Full tour details in our listings section.

Stooges drummer Scott Asheton has died age 64 from a heart attack. Asheton, nicknamed Rock Action because of the tattoo on his arm, played on all Stooges records. He played in a number of other groups in the late 1970s including Sonic's Rendezvous Band with The MC5's Fred Smith.

Asheton's original drum kit was home made, and included an oil drum. The group reunited in 2003 and began touring again, also releasing another album The Weirdness in 2007, which Asheton played on. Asheton stopped playing with the group after an illness 2011, and although he worked on 2013's Ready To Die, did not take part in the following tour.

Portuguese festival Semibreve returns to Braga for its fourth edition later this year. The festival takes place 10–12 October in the town's 99 year old theatre, and first acts announced who'll be shaking the rafters are Demdike Stare, Patten, and sound artist Ryoichi Kurokawa.

More acts to be added in the coming weeks. Joseph Stannard reviewed the festival in The Wire 346.

Following Knock Em Dead's reissue of Officer! album Ossification, the Blackest Ever Black label is reissuing Dead Unique. Originally recorded in 1995 the album has not been released before. Later in the year label boss Kiran Sande will also be releasing a 7" of two tracks from the 1983 Officer! tape Eight New Songs By Mick Hobbs. Officer! was Mick Hobbs, often joined by friends. Hobbs was also in The Work, and was associated with the groups which collected around This Heat's Cold Storage space in Brixton, South London. More details incoming at Blackest Ever Black. (Read a piece on those groups from a couple of years ago on Foxy Digitalis here.)

Dead Unique is released in late May as a double LP, CD and digitally. The 7" of "Life At The Water's Edge/Dogface" is due out around July. Mike Barnes wrote a history of Cold Storage in The Wire 258.

A documentary on Constellation Records has been released online, which features Do Make Say Think, Matana Roberts, Eric Chenaux and others. True to the strict syntactical rules we expect from post-rock titling, And We Made The Room Shine, documents eight performances in Montreal. Watch it below.

Record Store Day is great for independent record shops, but when it starts involving rabbit shaped vinyl reissues of Chas 'n' Dave, it's legitimate to lose a little faith in it. The product list for the 2014 Record Store Day (19 April) is 17 pages long. Here's an abbreviated list of Wire-centric highlights:

Vinyl reissues of: Michael Chapman Playing Guitar The Easy Way; Holger Czukay On The Way To The Peak Of Normal; Kode9 & The Spaceape Memories Of The Future; ESG Dance To The Best Of ESG; The Fall White Lightning; Sun Ra The Futuristic Sounds Of… and Outer Spaceways Incorporated; Hüsker Dü Candy Apple Grey.

On 7": The Thing's "Boot"; Frank Zappa's "Don’t Eat The Yellow Snow"; Julia Holter's "Don't Make Me Over" with "Hello Stranger"; Fela Kuti's "Se E Tun De" with "Waka Waka".

First time on vinyl for: Psychic TV's Thee Fabulous Feast Ov Flowering Light, Hacienda, and Live At The Marquee, all on double vinyl editions, Alexander Tucker's self titled album from 2005, Omar Souleyman's Jazeera Nights: Folk & Pop Sounds Of Syria; Ozit's purple vinyl edition of Captain Beefheart Son Of Dustsucker (The Roger Eagle Tapes).

New and/or unearthed recordings: Peter Zummo Lateral Pass; Carter Tutti Remix Chris & Cosey CD; Dinosaur Jr Fossils 5x7" box set; Half Japanese Volume 1: 1981–1985 triple LP set; a vinyl picture disc of Devo's return show, Butch Devo And The Sundance Gig; Melt Yourself Down Live At The New Empowering Church; William Onyeabor double 12" What?!; Rodion GA's Misiunea Spatiala Delta (Delta Space Mission); Teho Teardo & Blixa Bargeld 12" titled Spring!; Horace Andy Zion Sessions; Bardo Pond Looking For Another Place; Alvarius B/Sir Richard Bishop If You Don't Like It...Don't.

Not enough? The full list is here. Note: if you are stepping forth into the breach, not everywhere will have copies of everything.